‘Let mining communities benefit from mining revenue’
A lecturer at the University of Ghana Business School, Dr Abdul-Gafaru Abdulai, has underscored the need for the government to give mining communities greater part of the revenue accruing from minerals to help curb illegal mining activities.
Advertisement
By so doing, he said, the benefits would be felt by every individual in the community.
Dr Abdulai said this at a research dessemination workshop organised by the Centre for Democratic Development-Ghana (CDD). He spoke on the topic ‘Natural Resource Governance in Ghana’.
According to him, the current way of utilising the fun makes the people feel excluded from the benefits of the resource and suggested that a long term approach should be put in place to address these problems.
“How on earth can funds from the mineral development fund be used to construct a bungalow for a district chief executive? All of this leads to some form of exclusion and once you feel excluded you would have to act and find alternative means of surviving”, he said.
A case for illegal miners
Regarding illegal mining, he said it had been practised in the country since the pre-colonial days, a practice that the community benefited from significantly until the passage of the Mercury Ordinance in 1933 by the then colonial masters to criminalise it.
Following the structural adjustment reforms in the 80s, specifically in 1989, illegal mining was decriminalised. The government at the time recognised that the way to address this problem was not to see them as criminals because with the launch of the structural adjustment programmes and the emergence of large scale surface mining, a lot of people were displaced from their farm lands.
A situation he said deprived lots of people of their livelihood because a significant number of those who were displaced did not have the kind of formal education that would enable them to gain a foothold in the mining industry.
Other Trending Stories
According to him, the case of illegal mining is a livelihood matter and needed to be addressed from that perspective.
“If we agree that this is a livelihood issue, then one way of addressing it is to make sure the communities gain greater benefits. And that is the more reason why I have concerns in terms of the manner in which mining revenues are being disbursed currently. We just treat it as part of the larger government revenue so we have no idea of the exact benefits derived from the revenue”, he noted.
He said there had been cases in other countries where illegal miners had been put into cooperatives and trained on the dangers of their activities and how they could practise safe mining. He said countries were benefiting immensely from such an arragement.